Women's Space: Parish, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (review)

This welcome volume of essays addresses the neglected topic of women's space in the medieval parish, in order to balance previous studies that have focused on female monastic or domestic space. The papers present historical, literary, and art historical perspectives, drawing inspiration from spatial studies in geography, anthropology, and archaeology, with the influence of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler particularly evident. The authors focus predominantly on later medieval England, with one case study of fourteenth-century Florence, and two wide-ranging discussions of medieval spatial practices cross-culturally. Three themes unite these diverse studies: spatial metaphors of the body; the control of access to space according to gender; and the segregation of space in relation to gender concerns.

In a discussion of the shrine of St. Æthelthryth at the cathedral priory of Ely, Virginia Blanton explores how the enclosure of the body of the female saint is emphasized and developed as a symbol of the boundaries of the male monastic institution. Sarah Stanbury considers the corporeal quality of female religiosity, and how Margery Kempe presented her own body as sharing the suffering of Christ. Corine Schleif reviews the common tendency in Christian imagery to represent men on the right side of the church (the south) and women on the left (the north). She argues that this presupposes an embodied subject position for the viewing audience, framed by conventions for depicting the Crucifixion. She explores the meaning of church space as both a microcosm of the body, and a macrocosm of the divine universe.

Jane Tibbets Schulenburg gives a broad overview of evidence for the exclusion of women from male monastic churches from c. 500–1200, arguing that ecclesiastical control of women was motivated by clerical fears of female sexuality and the perceived "uncontainability" of women. A more comparative perspective would be useful to consider the extent to which female religious developed similar concerns to exclude men from their monastic space. The policies traced by Schulenburg were becoming more relaxed by the twelfth century, and recent scholarship has suggested that monastic space was more permeable than previously supposed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin explores this theme in relation to Margery Kempe's interaction with religious spaces. Kempe was able to contest spatial prohibitions to enjoy access to the choir of St. Margaret's, Lynn, a cell of Norwich Cathedral, even being allowed to take the sacrament every Sunday at the high altar. Further, she was able to disrupt male clerical control by using her episodes of weeping and shouting to rebel against the carefully managed soundscape of the medieval church. In their introduction, the editors raise the important issue of female control of the gaze, including the placement of squints, veils, and shutters in the parish church. This theme of female spatial agency is one that deserves to be developed and considered in relation to male control and exclusion of women from religious space.

It was common for men and women to be segregated in public gatherings, including religious celebrations both inside and outside churches. They were separated even in outdoor preaching yards and during processions such as those of the Corpus Christi. Ruth Evans considers gender in relation to the urban space of York and the performance of the York Cycle. The plays were staged on wagons, stopping at approved "stations" on a specified route, and Evans argues that distinct spaces became associated respectively with men and women, but also with transgendered practices such as cross-dressing. Katherine French discusses gender segregation in terms of seating in late medieval English parish churches. Her paper is particularly significant for its emphasis on localized gender concerns, demonstrating that the relationship between gender and space may be highly localized and historically specific. She contrasts evidence for seating patterns in two parishes, St. Margaret Westminster (1460–1530) and St. Mary Bridgwater, Somerset (1366–1471). She shows that in Westminster, women were active in buying and...